The Effects Of Anonymity On Decision Making Of GDSS Group

Today's business organizations are focusing on finding ways to increase their effectiveness. One direction for increasing effectiveness in organizations include the use of management teams to organize work and make decisions and the use of group decision support systems (GDSS) to support team meetings. GDSS brings anonymity, we are also interested in gender diversity under the GDSS environment. There is every indication that women will be an increasing percentage of the workplace, and work groups composed solely of men should no longer be the norm.We first present the theoretical model that guides the discussion of previous relevant literature in the area of decision making process and outcomes of groups using GDSS. A research model is derived and presented together with the variables, then, research hypotheses are given. This study examined the effects of GDSS technology and gender diversity on group decision making and decision shift. A 2x4 factorial design varied anonymity (anonymous vs. identified groups) by gender composition (all-male, majority-male, majority-female, and all-female groups). The group size was three. The GDSS which is programmed by the writer, is characterized by its communicate protocols and the implementation of the multi-process communication in Socket. The Results indicated that there were no gender differences for decision quality or decision shift. Also, there were no differences in decision quality for anonymous and identified groups, but anonymous individuals have less of a decision shift than identified individuals. Implications of these findings are discussed.